Microsoft may have cancelled the PC sales apocalypse

Microsoft's Panos Panay introduces the Microsoft Surface Book.
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It's no secret that PC sales are shrinking, as everybody and their mothers turn to smartphones and tablets.

That has led to miserable holiday PC sales, with worldwide PC shipments down 10.6% year-over-year in the final three months of 2015, research firm IDC announced on Tuesday. Sales of PCs for all of 2015 came in at the lowest level since 2008, IDC said in a press release.

By the second half of 2016, IDC says, things should stabilize a little bit in the PC market: Enterprises and consumers alike will turn to Microsoft Windows 10, the latest version of the PC operating system, as their existing systems run into security and performance issues.

But the biggest takeaway from the IDC report, by my reckoning, is the idea that laptops with detachable tablet portions — like the Microsoft Surface Book— could mitigate the decline in the PC market.

If you factor in these so-called detachables, IDC estimates that the PC market's expected 3.1% decline next year becomes a positive 1% to 2% of growth. It's not exactly a barnburner of a statistic, but any positive growth is better than the alternative.

Thanks to the success of the Microsoft Surface and Surface Pro line of tablet-laptop hybrids, many others have followed suit: HP, Dell, and Samsung all have laptops with detachable keyboards, and even Apple has followed suit with the iPad Pro.

In terms of traditional PCs, the top manufacturer for 2015 was Lenovo, with 20% of the market, by IDC's reckoning. It was followed by HP, Dell, Asus, and Apple, all of whom outperformed the market.

Apple, notably, performed far better than the overall market, and increased its slice of the pie to 7.5% in 2015 (up from 6.3% market share in 2014), which is a big deal considering the hefty pricetag on most of its machines.